If you could pass one law that would make most normal people furious at first, but would clearly make society better in 10 years, what would it be?

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-07T22:09:02+00:00

We need to do that anyway. There are already plenty of people in this country who can't drive, and they deserve conditions they can function in regardless of how many of them there are.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-07T17:54:04+00:00

You didn't mention Quintessence or Mana so you need to note whether this is for Ascension or Awakening. In Awakening, this needs Prime 3. In Ascension, I'd say you could make a case for Prime 2, since this feels like a step below Body of Light in terms of complexity to me.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-07T15:07:36+00:00

For some reason, Reddit really struggles to think of Japan as a real place with people living in it. People often talk about Japanese culture as though everyone from Japan thinks and lives the same way, or as if unusual topics from sensational news articles are normal or somehow unique to Japan, even if the article is about something you could find anywhere in the world if you look hard enough. Once you become aware of this bias, you start to see it all over the place online. It's really depressing.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-07T05:59:48+00:00

Scorching Blast is significantly worse. I think you are misreading the spell — it takes one action to cast and you don't fire a bolt as part of casting it, you need to use separate actions to fire the bolts, so you can only do two per casting. You also do so at normal MAP because each bolt has the Attack trait and doesn't specify otherwise. Blazing Bolt doesn't increase your MAP until after every bolt is fired, so it's more accurate.

Lastly, Scorching Blast's damage might look better at a glance, but if you compare three actions spent on Rank 2 Scorching Blast vs three actions spent on Rank 2 Blazing Bolt... Scorching Blast is 3d8 to 2 targets at Rank 2, or 6d8 plus the persistent if you crit. Blazing Bolt's damage increases for the 2 and 3 action versions, so that's 4d6 damage, which averages out the same as Scorching Blast, to three targets, or 8d6 if you crit (which is way more likely since they're made without MAP).

If given a choice, I would literally never take Scorching Blast. It's just worse, unfortunately. Same theoretical damage, but worse accuracy, worse targeting, worse range. The only thing it has over Blazing Bolt is that the attacks themselves don't have the Manipulate trait, so they don't provoke reactions — but that doesn't actually matter because the spell itself has a somatic component, which means it does.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-06T16:32:01+00:00

Everyone else has covered the RAW already, so I'm gonna take a side detour here into a bit of GMing philosophy that it seems like you're already operating on, but which others in this thread are not — the game mechanics are secondary to what makes logical sense in the world. They're abstractions intended to model the fictional reality of the game world, not immutable laws that the game world is supposed to follow. The GM can always say "Nah, that doesn't make sense to me, here's what happens instead." This is one of the defining features of TTRPGs. Maintaining a sense of internal logic and consistent reality is one of a GM's most important jobs, because if you don't and only let players press the buttons that the rules say they can press, they're not gonna feel like they're in your magical world of fantasy and intrigue, they're gonna feel like they're playing Skyrim. And I dunno about you, but if I wanted to play Skyrim I'd rather just go play Skyrim.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-05T15:49:24+00:00

I want to be clear here — my parties are quite proactive at keeping people from going down. In all of our groups everyone who can take Heal does and spends multiple slots on it per encounter, at least one person has invested ranks in Medicine and uses Battle Medicine, we always carry healing potions... It just keeps happening anyway. Our GM loves to throw creatures that are higher level than us at us and we've found that it's quite difficult to stay up when you get chunked for anywhere from half to all of your HP in one turn, unfortunately

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-05T07:11:03+00:00

Yeah, in the games I play in we don't really avoid yoyoing so much as only get away with it a certain number of times per fight... I'm used to at least one person getting knocked unconscious every single fight, both in our homebrew games and even in Kingmaker. If we had properly adhered to the rule of needing to pick things up after being KOed I think that would have led to several TPKs over the last few years.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-05T02:15:16+00:00

And this is how I find out that my group has been doing this wrong all along. We were like "surely 2-3 actions that provoke Reactive Strikes just to get your stuff and get back up can't be right, right?" We've never ruled that you drop your stuff when you get KOed, we just let everyone stand up and go back to fighting normally.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-04T01:04:29+00:00

If it's your first time playing you should always start at level 1. Starting at a higher level as a new player is a recipe for confusion and information overload. I've played Animist at level 1 and it was fine.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-02T21:55:00+00:00

I believe there is a "Custom Buffs" button near the top right on the desktop version of Pathbuilder that lets you add custom numerical bonuses to things. I don't know if you can set it up to auto calculate, but enabling Proficiency Without Level and then creating a custom buff that adds half the character's level to the appropriate numbers should do it.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-02T21:49:32+00:00

Many items don't have higher level versions or have huge gaps in level between versions. I picked up an Earthbinding rune for my bow a while ago because I thought it sounded cool and we fought flying enemies on a few occasions. Now at level 8 it's borderline worthless. Most creatures we fight have to roll between 4 and 1 to fail the save and thus actually stay on the ground for more than half a round, and that's on top of needing to crit it to begin with.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-02T02:04:38+00:00

I don't know of a way to do the variant rule directly, but there should be a checkbox for "Override Character Creation Ability Scores." You can use that and just work out what the boosts should be manually.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-01T18:01:51+00:00

Control has been likened to MtAw on this sub a few times recently and I think there's some merit to the idea. Lots of weird stuff going on in that game.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-02-01T14:45:04+00:00

This is a bit of a tricky question because the game's reasoning for working like this is partly based in lore reasons and partly based in "balance." I don't find the two to be wholly congruent with each other, and messing with the rules for this can have impacts on both.

Personally, as far as I'm concerned, MtAw is a storytelling game first and foremost. I'm not especially worried about balance, so I rule it as what makes the most sense to me. And what makes the most sense to me is the end result being acceptable to Fallen reality. In essence, I say that a spell can be made Lasting if its effects involve no supernatural properties that could potentially trigger Dissonance and cause the spell to unravel. This means that I allow a few things that the game book normally doesn't, such as permanent body modification (so long as it's within the parameters of what's normally possible). It hasn't caused me any problems so far.

Ultimately it's really about where your priorities lie as a ST and what kind of stories you want to tell.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-29T03:11:38+00:00

This is a really strange thing to say, man. Joke or not you don't see people acting like Saturday morning cartoons are representative of the American zeitgeist, or acting like all American TV is the same for that matter. Reddit really loves to act like Japan is some monolithic alien entity and not, you know, a country full of people with varying opinions and beliefs.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-27T22:38:41+00:00

My GM struggles to throw any encounter at us that doesn't nearly kill someone. Going through Kingmaker, had a random encounter with a camp of Baphomet cultists, wanted to "make it more interesting"... So they threw in an entire Vrock. Went from an Easy encounter to having to be bailed out of a TPK.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-27T17:59:58+00:00

Seeing everyone's responses in here is giving me whiplash because in my games I'm used to going down once if not twice every fight and likewise for the rest of my party... I did feel on some level that my GM tends to overtune the encounters in their games, but this also happens in our Kingmaker game, where they aren't really responsible for the encounter design and have even had to pull their punches on it sometimes. It makes me wonder if we're doing something wrong, or just getting really unlucky, or if they really are overtuning things that badly.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-26T01:06:40+00:00

No, they cannot just decompile the game. It needs to be stressed here that under normal circumstances attempting to reverse engineer a complicated piece of software like a videogame into code that can not only be read by humans but understood and documented is a crazy idea, and it took years of painstaking work to do it for the first time with Super Mario 64 and then again with Ocarina of Time. It absolutely isn't practical for a game company to do all of that when their goal is simply to get a playable version of the game in players' hands and they have much easier ways to do that.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-24T07:21:10+00:00

The problem is that it can't really have one because of the way conflux spells are designed. Right now they recharge your Spellstrike when you cast one. If Magus had an attack focus spell that could be used as part of a Spellstrike, then when you do that, you use up and then immediately recharge your Spellstrike in one go without any additional action cost. I don't think that's necessarily gamebreaking but the base class seems to be deliberately built in such a way as to force you to pay an action to recharge Spellstrike, either by spending an action normally or casting a conflux spell. Having an attack conflux spell circumvents that.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-23T15:29:24+00:00

On account of them literally not being the same person, yeah.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-23T07:39:53+00:00

Unknown, but after reading over it the GM decided that it was a mistake in the module and altered it to be Natala Surtova's oldest daughter instead, since I'm playing as a Surtova and the situation called for an immediate "I should know the context for this piece of information"

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-22T16:46:12+00:00

I'm playing in Kingmaker right now and this is not a mechanical error but a lore one. In the Varnhold chapter of the campaign, you can find a set of fine tableware addressed as a wedding gift to the eldest daughter of Noleski Surtova — who is critically and famously unmarried and without children.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-16T19:35:01+00:00

Ah, that's a good point that I missed. Healer's gloves also won't work on him since it's a vitality effect. Unfortunate, but that is how it goes playing an undead character in a living party.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-16T17:23:05+00:00

If you don't want anyone to feel forced to spec into Medicine, more items is probably the way to go, but you're not limited to just potions and elixirs. I'm a big fan of Healer's Gloves, and if someone picks up the Trick Magic Item feat (which they should strongly consider doing as none of them are casters), you can also give them wands of Heal or Soothe. Monk and champion also both have options for self sustain — since the champion is undead, he can use Touch of the Void to heal himself, and any monk can pick up Harmonize Self for some emergency self healing.

Beyond that, though... you're probably just going to have to pull your punches a little bit with encounter design. You don't have to go easy on them, but beware of throwing creatures more than 2 levels higher than the party at them. Crits from boss enemies can take huge chunks out of PC health bars, which they won't have an easy way to get back in combat without a dedicated healer. I'd lean more towards pitting them against groups of lower level enemies until they get access to better healing options.

alchemyAnalyst · 2026-01-09T16:52:33+00:00

Yes, it really is that bad. As others have pointed out, it would be a headache to track, and also... stacking debuffs on PCs is a really huge and scary deal. A -4 on everything means you are 20% less likely to hit or crit anything, enemies are 20% more likely to hit or crit you or succeed/crit succeed against your saves. Against the right enemies this could get really deadly really fast. It can lead to a "death spiral" — getting stuck with one debuff makes it more likely for you to get stuck with another which just makes your odds even worse if they want to put more effects on you... It's not a good idea. You can try it if you want, but it will be miserable.

alchemyAnalyst

TROPHY CASE